American higher education and the MOOC 3.0 era

By eCampus News staff and wire reports

July 19th, 2013

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, splashed on the higher education scene in sensational fashion in the summer of 2012, The Huffington Post reports. When Coursera (a Silicon Valley start-up MOOC platform) enrolled its one millionth student, The New York Times took notice with a front page article, and the higher education trade press began covering the topic on a daily basis–often with multiple stories a day. Coursera and two other major MOOC platforms, Udacity and edX, were hailed as truly transformational, a potential cure-all for the problems of how to contain college costs and boost the number of Americans who earn college degrees. … It certainly hasn’t taken long for the pendulum to swing from what I like to call the MOOC 1.0 era, through the MOOC 2.0 period and quickly on to what I have dubbed the MOOC 3.0 era. The MOOC 3.0 era shows us that these courses and the technology that drives them hold great promise for expanding the higher education pipeline but in a much more nuanced and customized manner than envisioned when they first burst into public view. MOOC content and concepts are being integrated with more traditional, mainstream higher education delivery models, producing rapidly evolving hybrid forms of MOOCs where, for instance, students take an online class but also have the opportunity to meet in-person with tutors.